Sandra's Story

Back in the mid 1990's I heard Sherry Lansing (the first women to head up a major Hollywood Studio and the most powerful person in Hollywood for many years) share a story about a bizarre recurring dream.

In the dream she was standing at the corner of Sunset Boulevard. Her ex-husband drove past in a convertible Rolls Royce, trophy bride at his side, with Lansing herself cast as a bag lady watching the pair glide by! Lansing went on to disclose that, based on the dream, she began to suffer from what she called The Bag Lady Syndrome. Despite being worth tens of millions of dollars, Lansing nevertheless encountered acute anxiety whenever she considered her money.

She worried, primarily, about whether she had accumulated sufficient assets to keep her in the lifestyle to which she had become accustomed.

Bag Lady Syndrome

The Bag Lady Syndrome is, of course, not an actual medical condition. It is, rather, an acute sense of vulnerability that afflicts many highly successful women who have an anxiety-riddled relationship with money.

Sandra pursues her mission to help them combat a syndrome that, while not a genuine pathology, is acutely distressing to many women - and to more men than many of them are prepared to admit.

Women & Wealth

Some facts:

  • According to the prestigious Boston Consulting Group, women now control one third of all the privately held financial assets in North America.

  • Women control $1.1 trillion in privately held assets in Canada alone, and that number is growing rapidly.

  • 70% of women change investment advisors within one year of being pre-deceased by their spouse. Typically, they seek out a competent and empathetic female advisor.

  • At the Royal Bank of Canada, women occupy 40% of the executive positions and 54% of the management roles. Reassuring.